Read on Twitter
US history #twitterstorians - as a non-US historian from India, I know how painful the #1776Report must be professionally and as citizens. As you respond, the experience of historians is worth considering to understand both what's at stake and the limits of what we can do 1/
In my survey of modern South Asian history, when teaching the watershed destruction of the Babri mosques by Hindutva extremists egged on by the current ruling party, the BJP, I assign as a primary source this response written by India's leading historians of the day.
3/ The response is a meticulous demonstration of the historian's craft by some of India's best practitioners, many of whom, including my own advisor, is renowned in global academia. Yet, over the two following decades we have definitively lost the battle over national history.
4/ Since then, the practice of history to professional standards has incurred increasingly violent consequences, including imprisonment, loss of employment, garnishing of wages/pensions, and even assassination. Here are some of the same names protesting the murder of MM Kalburgi.
5/ My admiration for these scholars, as scholars and citizens, is bottomless. Their valiant efforts held off for a while the complete distortion of the national curriculum and textbooks and I use the NCERT as a teaching tool. My name now pops up on the same statements they sign.
6/ These statements, written in English, were never meant to change hearts and minds. Perhaps, if they had been armed with social media, they might not have lost ground to the RW propaganda machine we Indians tellingly call WhatsApp university.
7/ The real purpose, whether they were fully aware of it or not, was to ensure that (English-medium) national institutions, especially the Supreme Court, would continue to adjudicate and govern based on FACT. This is the real battle that we lost.
8/ In 2019, the court unilaterally rejected evidence-based history as the basis for state decision-making. This rejection paved the way for the worst and most consequential miscarriage of justice in India #BabriMasjidAwaitsJustice https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/historians-report-on-babri-mosque-mere-opinion-sc/articleshow/71176583.cms
9/ The court's equation of evidence-based history with opinion was aided by the same process playing out here: the increasingly monopolistic structure of corporate media, journalistic norms of fallacious "balance," the fragmentation of information markets also happened in India
10/ The same erosion of faith in expertise, fueled by political failure with impunity, has led to a basic distrust of science and academic knowledge that I see playing out here.
11/ While Modi touts Indian engineering expertise, built on Nehruvian educational infrastructure to burnish his neoliberal credentials, at home the BJP has ushered in a dark age of unreason. https://scroll.in/article/908392/chauvanistic-claims-embarrassed-indian-scientists-protest-irrational-comments-at-science-congress
12/ While we may laugh, the consequences are deadly. India is now playing with fire by forcing citizens to take the untested #Covaxin by a crony capitalist client of the Modi govt. which has not released even Phase 3 data. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/world/asia/india-covid-19-vaccine.html
13/ Trump has set a horrific precedent in the US, the endpoint of which looks like India today: the state has equated evidence-based knowledge with political opinion AND it has made it possible to make policy on the basis of the latter.
14/ This is the real danger that US academics must fight tooth and nail. Learned op-eds are not going to stem the tide of public opinion in the current structure of media markets. Like social media outreach, producing them is important but they can only achieve so much.
15/ More important is the fight for school textbooks- Indian historians understood this at the national level but they failed to do this at the state level. The result: ideologues first destroyed history education at the state level before taking the game national.
16/ But the thing to really watch out for is the ways in which the state intervenes in the production of knowledge, suppresses inconvenient knowledge and makes policy on the basis of partisan belief, not knowledge.
17/ Trump has destroyed the credibility of the CDC, has gutted expertise at USDA, suppressed inconvenient knowledge at the EPA, and with the 1776 Commission, has equated mythological propaganda with evidence-based knowledge.
18/ Realign the priorities of @AHAhistorians as our professional organization to act as a watchdog against the subversion of academic freedom and to protest any state body that is using false history to make decisions or equating evidence based history with opinion.
19/ And historians need to provide resources for citizens fighting these influences at every level of government. So more important than an op-ed in the NYTimes is producing a handbook for people to fight this report in local school board elections.
20/ As individual academics, we are not going to overcome the fundamental structural problems in information markets and suddenly sway millions of people with our carefully documented logically constructed arguments.
30/ But ALL academics are invested in the fight for evidence-based knowledge production. #STEM scholars need to support #humanities- which also means respecting our expertise and understanding it IS expertise and supporting our budgetary needs. It is not a zero-sum game.
31/ So #MarchforScience but also march in support of historians and critical race theorists and sociologists and gender and disability studies scholars and all the other types of scholars the Trum administration has systematically sought to undermine. We are all in this together.
